


Sand and Smoke

by Thymesis



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Masturbation, Missing Scene, No Dialogue, POV Third Person, Pinch Hit Assignment, Yuleporn, Yuletide 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-12 13:23:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12960138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thymesis/pseuds/Thymesis
Summary: Salim spends the night in the ifrit’s New York apartment and enjoys a private moment with a very special sweater. In the morning, he makes an important decision.





	Sand and Smoke

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Esteliel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Esteliel/gifts).



> Although technically TV-verse, this story also incorporates material from the novel and may be read as a novel-verse AU.
> 
> Posted to the exchange on December 16, 2017.

It wasn’t as easy as they made it sound in the guidebooks.

Yes, the avenues ran north to south, and the streets ran west to east, but that was only in Manhattan, and it wasn’t even true for _all_ of Manhattan. As for the rest of New York City, well, the rest of New York City was something else entirely.

Before, Salim had been afraid of the people on the sidewalks, the sheer diversity and quantity of them, their cloyingly sweet stink in the air all around him. Now, he had a whole new set of fears: one-way streets and traffic lights, busy crosswalks and inattentive pedestrians, honking horns and tailgaters, sirens and cop cars, bridges and tunnels and toll booths. Highways. Gridlock.

It had taken him over ten hours to find the address, hastily scribbled on a piece of half-torn scrap paper, that the ifrit had given him, a sublet in a decrepit Victorian townhouse on the outermost eastern edge of Queens. This was basically as far as you could drive in New York and still _be in_ New York. At least it had been relatively easy to find street-side parking.

There were three keys on the ifrit’s keyring. The first had been the key for the cab; the second opened the front door to the townhouse; and the third, bearing a grubby sticker marked 3B, opened a door in the third-floor attic with a large, black “B” painted on it.

The ifrit’s entire studio apartment was smaller than Salim’s sister’s closet in their family home in Muscat. Jinn may or may not grant wishes, but they definitely didn’t live in magic lamps. The space was depressing and utterly without character—nothing of the ifrit in it—and the ceiling was so low in places that Salim, short though he was, had to stoop. This was most noticeable directly above the twin bed, in the kitchen nook, and in the bathroom.

Well. That would make cooking inconvenient…not that Salim was particularly good at cooking. And who really needed lots of headroom above their bed, anyway? He wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor, so that was already a plus. And Salim figured he didn’t need to piss standing up. There was nothing wrong with using the toilet seat for its intended purpose. Who was going to be around to mock him for insufficient manliness in a place like this, anyway? In fact, the process of finally—finally!—emptying his bladder was the most pleasant thing he had done thus far today.

After that, however, he realized how empty his stomach was. He hadn’t had the opportunity to eat all day. Unfortunately, the kitchen cabinets were mostly empty as well: There was olive oil, spices, and a bag of rice, but Salim wasn’t sure how to cook the rice. (He pretended he hadn’t seen the roach bait. There were no roaches to be found…yet.) The refrigerator, roughly the same size as the mini-bar fridge in his now abandoned hotel room, was hardly more promising: three tomatoes spotted black with rot, one yellow squash in a tied-off produce bag that felt more liquid than solid, a half-eaten hamburger that looked like it might have fossilized, and a half-empty gallon of milk.

Salim sniffed the milk carton warily. Well, it smelled safe to drink. After further rummaging through the cabinets, he found a bowl, a spoon, and an unopened box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Salim knew what he’d be having for dinner.

By the time he’d finished his third bowl of cornflakes, it was completely dark outside, and a sudden wave of exhaustion threatened to overtake him. He knew it was past time for him to pray, but he’d become so disoriented that he couldn’t even begin to guess which direction he ought to be facing. So instead, he just climbed into the narrow bed, still fully clothed, and lay down.

Salim was sound asleep almost before he’d even closed his eyes.

***

He woke abruptly, in pitch blackness, to a hiss of steam and a raucous, metallic clanging noise as the house’s ancient heater system turned on. He’d been dreaming of the desert, face buried in his pillow, and his nostrils were full of the scents of sand and smoke. For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was. Was he in Manhattan? Or back in Oman? Panicking, he sat bolt upright…and cracked his forehead hard into the low ceiling.

Salim cursed and fumbled for the bedside lamp. That had hurt! He managed to flick the switch on without knocking it over. The lamp had no lampshade, and the light of the spiral-shaped, energy saver bulb brightened only gradually. Its illumination had a sickly, greenish cast.

The digital clock beside the lamp read 12:37 AM.

In the dead of night, the ifrit’s studio looked even more depressing than when Salim had first arrived. Now he noticed the cracks in the plaster, the mud and grime on the linoleum tile floor, the cobwebs in the corners, and precisely how old, poorly maintained, and/or _cheap_ everything was. It was shit. Shit, plain and simple. Just like so much of everything else in America. How could any of Allah’s creatures, never mind one as magnificent as an ifrit, live under such conditions?

How, for that matter, could Salim? Yes, he’d been freed from the disapproval of his family and the twin tyrannies of his sister and her husband. No, he would not have to hide his attraction to other men anymore. Men could marry each other here! But would he ever find someone to love, let alone to marry? Would things be _better_? Maybe he was just fooling himself; maybe the life of the taxi driver Ibrahim bin Irem was just another sort of imprisonment; and maybe Ibrahim bin Irem’s clothes were the prison uniform.

Salim kicked off the shoes from his feet, tore the faded, threadbare pair of jeans from his legs, and tossed the lot of them onto the floor in disgust. The ifrit hadn’t even left Salim his underwear, and the jeans had been chafing. The dust-colored sweater quickly followed, up and over Salim’s head and into his hands, where it was crumpled into a big, shapeless ball of knitted wool yarn, ready to be added to the pile on the floor, to…to…

The sweater wasn’t actually the color of dust. In the artificial light of the energy saver bulb, it was layered silver, copper, and jade like a semi-precious desert stone. Secretly beautiful, as the ifrit had been. On impulse, Salim pressed the sweater to his face and inhaled.

A piercing bolt of arousal shot straight into his groin. Oh…oh _wow_.

Another long inhalation. When had the sweater been laundered last? The ifrit had complained in the taxi, Salim recalled, that he’d been working for thirty hours straight on five hours of sleep. Before that, he’d been working fourteen hours. Presumably, he’d been wearing the same clothes for much, if not all, of this time. Yet the ifrit’s sweater did not smell unpleasant or unclean. No, it smelled strongly, rather, of sand and smoke—the scent of the ifrit himself after he’d emerged from the hotel room shower, exactly as Salim remembered it from last night—and also ever so slightly of Salim. This was inalienable proof of their union, proof that it had all been real, that it hadn’t just been a dream. Ah, their union… Salim’s hand slid between his legs. He was already half-erect, and it wouldn’t take much to get the rest of the way there. He took himself firmly in hand.

Salim began moving his fist up and down his erection in earnest, hard, fast, desperate strokes that he’d learned as a boy would bring him to completion quickly, before he could be discovered and made to feel ashamed of his abominable weakness. He nuzzled his cheek against the soft wool of the sweater, imagining that it was the ifrit’s soft, coarse hair—the hair on his head, perhaps, or the fragrant, tangled patches between his legs and in his armpits. Would that he could have spent a lifetime savoring each and every last millimeter of the ifrit!

He’d never seen an uncircumcised penis before, never touched one, and he’d certainly never imagined how much he’d like it. It wasn’t dirty or profane, as he’d been raised to believe; it was beautiful, vulnerable, human—imagine touching a divine creature in order to know humanity!—and oh so sweetly _alive_. How silky the foreskin had been, filigreed with pulsing veins, how slick and sensitive the glans had been underneath. He’d loved holding it in his hands, testing the mobility of the flesh, how freely and far it would move, even once the ifrit was so hard and so close to coming that his scrotum had begun to pull in tight. And that spot on the underside where inner shaft and outer sheath had been attached, how the ifrit had moaned brokenly when Salim had caressed it with the pad of his thumb!

Yet even that had been nothing, nothing at all, to compare to what the ifrit had felt like inside of him. Huge and hot as the desert sands at high noon, hot as the blue heart of a candle flame. Thrusting with such slow and deep strokes that Salim had thought he would go mad before it ended. And when it _had_ actually ended—! The seed of the ifrit was the essence of fire itself, and it had burned him with its bright energy, seared him, quickening his spirit with eternal, passionate devotion. In that moment, human intercourse had become divine. Salim could barely remember his own orgasm.

He felt his orgasm _now_ , though, his hips jerking upwards, his anal sphincter fluttering. He buried his face into the balled up sweater as he yelled profanities and his semen began to fountain out of him in long, powerful jets that seemed to go on forever, coating his chest and the bed and even splattering the low ceiling. It was agony; it was ecstasy. Tears were leaking unchecked from the corners of his eyes.

How would—how _could_ —he go on, having known such joy once in the arms of the ifrit, never to know it again? The masturbation had been intense, more intense than it had ever been before in his life, but it had not given him true release. He was in torment, brokenhearted. Clutching the sweater to his chest, Salim curled onto his side and continued to weep until sleep again overtook him.

***

_In his left hand is a return air ticket to Muscat, Oman._

_In his right hand is an Amtrak train ticket which will take him as far west as Chicago._

_He crumples up the ticket in his left hand and tosses it into a nearby trash can._

_He could have left America, but he has chosen not to. He had been born in this land and sustained by the hearts of its people, and he has chosen to stay._

_To face the coming storm. To fight in Odin’s war._

***

The next morning, Salim began by praying in what he hoped was the direction of Mecca. After that, he had a fourth bowl of cornflakes for breakfast, washed his dishes in the kitchen sink, and did his best to wash up in the studio apartment’s tiny bathroom. He even tried smiling at his own reflection in the mirror; wounded but tentatively hopeful brown eyes shone back at him. Then he made the bed and put the ifrit’s clothes back on.

The sweater still smelled reassuringly of sand and smoke. That hadn’t been just a dream either, he told himself. Salim’s ears still rang from the deafening honk of the train’s horn as it had pulled out of Penn Station.

He locked the door marked “B” on his way out with the first of his three keys. He also locked the front door of the dilapidated Victorian townhouse with the second key. He found the yellow taxi, unmolested, in exactly the same place he had parked it. The third key unlocked the car and started its engine.

Maybe he did not have to become the taxi driver Ibrahim bin Irem. Maybe there were other, less traveled roads he was meant to take. Someone else with whom he was meant to be.

For all that it had been so terribly difficult to navigate New York City yesterday, leaving it today could not have been easier, and practically before he knew it, he was crossing the Hudson River, heading westbound on the George Washington Bridge—the infamous “GWB”—and then south on the I-95—the equally infamous New Jersey Turnpike.

In Teaneck, New Jersey, Salim began driving straight west again on the I-80. This was a highway which crossed the entire continental United States, from proverbial sea to shining sea. Somewhere along the way, he knew, he would again cross paths with the ifrit. They belonged together; they would not be parted again. The ifrit already lived in Salim’s heart. And if there was to be a war, well, Salim would just have to find his courage and fight the good fight alongside these American gods of men.

It was at some point during that first day’s drive (the first of many, as it turned out), and he wasn’t certain exactly when afterwards, but it was sometime after the highway had widened, perhaps, or the distance between the other cars and his taxi had begun to open up:

Salim realized he wasn’t afraid anymore.

 

END


End file.
